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Robert F. Kennedy challenges Gross Domestic Product

ipyramid · Youtube · 4 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention ipyramid's video "Robert F. Kennedy challenges Gross Domestic Product".
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Forty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy challenged the basic way we measure progress and well-being in America. Today, the Glaser Progress Foundation is raising the same questions through a new medium. The Seattle-based foundation released a new web video marking the anniversary of a famous speech in which Kennedy said the Gross Domestic Product counts "everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
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Although working fewer hours can mean more work (or at least a greater distribution of work), producing on a smaller scale is much more efficient than producing on a larger scale.

This is due to Borsodi's law which states that as the cost of production decreases due to centralized operation, the cost of processing and distribution increases disproportionately [1]. For example, if a greenhouse produces one type of fruit for the entire continent, its production costs are low but distribution costs will be much higher e.g. the costs of transporting the fertilizer to the site, and those of transporting the goods as well as cooling, packaging, marketing.These distribution costs will be much higher than in several decentralised small-scale regenerative agriculture productions.

All waste on gasoline, packaging and fertilizer (much of it synthetic) enters in the GDP. In fact the GDP is not a good measure of progress at all and this discourse to clarify why [2]

At the moment in developed countries you have 2% of the population working in agriculture and 40% in distribution. Even if you increase the number of jobs in agriculture (for example to 10%) this would mean a fairly large reduction in employment in distribution.

We have to solve our social and environmental problems even if it does not provide jobs. Employment is a means to an end and not the end in itself.Previous generations created infrastructure unimaginable 100 years ago and that is the reason why there is no employment. To insist on full employment is not to value what has been done.

I leave here a quote from Ralph Borsodi:

"It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind's most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve -- the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them. When he produces more things than are necessary to good living, he wastes both of them; he wastes time and he wastes material, both of which should be used to make the world a more beautiful place in which to live, and life in it more beautiful than it is Today".

[1] https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/GoodBooks/The%2... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY

It depends. If it generate any kind of money exchange it counts to GDP. But there are many solutions that don't generate growth (like walking to work instead of using other means of transportation)

The way we measure growth is nuts. the best way to acknowledge that is to watch this speech from Robert F Kennedy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY

I'd also be interested in effect on resource consumption.

GDP isn't everything. I can't say it better than Kennedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY

The problem with GDP per capita comparisons is that GDP is a bit of a weak measure of economic performance. It is a measure of raw, unadjusted economic throughput (cash flow, essentially), not necessarily a measure of economic performance. It is increased by an inefficient healthcare system (healthcare spending makes up 17.7% of the US GDP all on its own, while most of the affluent European countries are in the 9%-11% range), by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the United States' comparatively high energy usage per capita. See also RFK's famous quote one the GNP [1].

The reason why GDP is still used prominently as an economic indicator, while economists have been looking for better metrics, all those other metrics involve a fair amount of subjectivity. And GDP is still a pretty decent predictor of economic performance, despite its known weaknesses.

But in the end, higher GDP does not necessarily translate into higher quality of life (of course, once the gap is large enough, it almost certainly does, at least for the average person, but we aren't talking orders of magnitude here). I don't think you'll see overall higher QoL in the US compared to Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, or France (the four OECD countries with the fewest hours worked per capita), regardless of where the GDP per capita is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY

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In the past two years, I've spent six months living in Germany. The quality-of-life difference between that country and the US is striking.

In Germany, it appeared that ordinary people could both afford to, and were inclined to, partake often in small pleasures such as having a Bier and a bite at outdoor cafes in the summer. The streets were lined with these cafes and restaurants, most doing a brisk business. I never saw so many cut-flower shops in my life. The small pleasure of flowers was both affordable AND something that was on the minds of ordinary people, something that one would never encounter in the US.

Here, such things are looked upon as frivolous luxuries, and financially they are that for the 99%. If you can afford such things as cut flowers, then, we're told by our betters, you can also work for less money or work more for what you're earning currently. Why do you deserve luxuries, peon?

Despite what the pro-workaholic, GDP-flaunting people in the US would say, Germans on the whole seem to be quite materially prosperous. But with that, they are culturally prosperous in a quality-of-life sense too. They seem to expect it, whereas in the US a high QoL is reserved for the wealthy.

Obviously I'm not saying that every German lives this way, necessarily. But I think that this cultural observation is accurate. I think if average people in the US would be brought to understand that they too could have a modest life containing a big helping of everyday pleasures and without life-sucking, excessive work expectations, there'd be a revolution.

adventured
What part of the US are you comparing to?

We must be living in very different countries, because the things you describe, I know very few people who can't afford simple things like cut flowers whenever they want them, or to go eat out at a cafe.

Average / middle class people I knew while living in LA did these things constantly.

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Maybe you do live in a different country. In my decades-long residence in Washington State, my upbringing in Vermont, my considerable time in Sacramento, my years in Eastern Mass, and my trips around the US and Canada, I've never been somewhere where people "did these things constantly". If they did, every block would have a cut flower shop. These are a relative rarity, you'd usually have to look them up if you wanted one.

Average people I've known in the places I've lived most definitely did not frequent flower shops or cafes. And by "average", I include Target employees and Walmart employees and the clerical employees of most companies large and small. That is to say, most people in the US.

Apart from the financial issue, my point was that there's a cultural phenomenon going on. In Germany my feeling was that the residents had a joie de vivre that is largely missing in the US, something which is probably both a cause and effect of the cult of overwork.

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